Angry Planet - The Afghanistan Papers and the Unwinnable Forever War

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

Last week the Washington Post published The Afghanistan Papers—a blockbuster piece of reporting that details every little thing about what’s gone wrong with the Afghanistan War. As the war grinds through its second decade, the Afghanistan Papers make clear what many defense reporters, government officials, and soldiers have known for years. The Afghanistan War is a costly, pointless, unwinnable mess.Here to walk us through the Afghanistan Papers and its implications is Craig Whitlock. Whitlock is the author of the Washington Post report and an investigative reporter who specializes in national security issues. He has covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin bureau chief and reported from more than 60 countries.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. What we think was news from the Afghanistan papers were really the raw admissions of failure, particularly from people at the top. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts.

Welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. Last week, the Washington Post published the Afghanistan Papers, a blockbuster piece of reporting that details every little thing about what's going wrong with the Afghan war. As the war grinds through its second decade, the Afghanistan papers make clear what many defense reporters, government officials, and soldiers have known for years. The Afghanistan War is a costly, pointless, unwinnable mess. Here to walk us through the Afghanistan papers and its implications is Craig Whitley.

Lottlock. Whitlock is the author of the Washington Post report and an investigative reporter who specializes in national security issues. He's covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin Bureau Chief, and reported from more than 60 countries. Craig, thank you so much for joining us. Sure thing. Glad to be here. All right. So as we like to do kind of at the top of the show is get some basics out of the way.

So the bulk of the Afghanistan papers is based on the work of Cigar and one man in particular in his team, John Sop. So here at the top, can you kind of tell us what Cigar is and who Sopgo is? Sure. So Cigar is an acronym for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. It's an agency that was created by Congress about a decade ago to monitor fraud, waste, and abuse in the war zone. You know, primarily like a normal inspector general would, you know, do accounting investigations, things like that. In 2014, this agency, which is headed by a man named John Sopko, decided to do a different kind of project called a Lessons Learned project in which they would interview hundreds of people

who were involved in the war in some fashion to get their sense of mistakes that were made and try and publish some public reports so that these mistakes wouldn't be made again if the United States found itself in a similar conflict. The Inspector General did published about seven of these reports, these lessons learned reports, since 2016. But what we found is that they actually omitted the vast majority of the comments made by people in these interviews as well as their names. So we filed a Freedom Information Act request for them. Long story short, we ended up having to go to court twice to sue the agency under the

Public Records Act to force it to disclose transcripts and notes of these interviews. and that was the basis for most of the Afghanistan papers. What is it that was in those papers that they were claiming they didn't want to release and why? What was the justification? So there's two categories. First of all, they didn't want to release any of them. They said it was, you know, they gave all sorts of reasons that didn't make a lot of sense. They said they were a work product.

They said it was, you know, these weren't classified, but Sigard does not have a classification authority. but then they sent them out to other agencies just to see if somebody happened to blurt out something that might be classified in these interviews. I think their primary concern was that they had told many of these people that they wouldn't quote them publicly without their permission. But once the Washington Post asked for the interviews, then their full remarks would be made public. So they also withheld most of the names. They said that they were prohibited from releasing about 300 of the 400 names. So we're actually still in litigation with the agency. We think there's an overwhelming public interest in gaining the full set of documents without any redactions,

including the names of the people who made these comments and criticisms about the war. You know, if the people running the war thought it was a failure or didn't make any sense or that there was no strategy, you know, that's something the American people have a right to know about. about. The agent, the inspector general disagrees with us about that, but so far we've prevailed on every count in court. All right. Well, tell me a little bit more about kind of the broad strokes of what is in the SIGA reports. Like you said, they've been, he's been doing these since, is it 2008 when they first started? And lesson learned started. Yeah, thereabouts. Lessons learned started in, was it 2016, you said?

That's right. Their first report came out in 2016. It was about corruption. And so they take a different theme on, you know, the first one was on corruption. They've done one on rebuilding the Afghan economy. They've done on private sector development or the Afghan security forces. So, you know, important topics like that. And there's no question their reports are thorough. They're thick. They're mostly based on other government reports and communications.

There's a few quotations in the reports. But by and large, what we found is all these interviews, they did this vast trove of of primary interviews with key players in the war, they left most of that on the cutting room floor or, you know, more accurately on their laptops. And that's everything we quoted in our series was all information that the inspector general did not include in his public report. So people, you know, should feel free to compare the two of them. I'm not saying that the inspector general didn't publish anything, but we thought the more newsworthy revelations were what the inspector general left out and did not want to make public. But I also think that, in my opinion, I've been covering Afghanistan for a while.

I've read a lot of Special Inspector General reports. One of the beautiful things I think about this Washington Post piece is that it really, including obviously the revelations that you've talked about, it puts everything together kind of in one place in clear language. Because most people aren't going to sit and read the Special Inspector General Oral's 400 page quarterly report whenever, every time it comes out, right? So what are, what's going wrong in Afghanistan? Like, what are the big bullet points?

Like, tell me about opium. Well, I'll tell you about opium. I mean, that's a problem. But I do want to make a distinction here. I mean, the fact that the war in Afghanistan hasn't been going well and that it's, you know, it's been a failure in many ways. That's not news. But what we think was news from the Afghanistan papers were really the raw admissions of failure, particularly from people at the top.

So when you go through these interviews, you get commanding general after commanding general, diplomat after diplomat, white house official after white house official, just describing the war in the most eviscerating terms. And, you know, when you get, you know, a general like Dan McNeil, former four-star, four-star, Army General who twice served as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. He says, you know, we didn't have a strategy at all. When I went over there, I tried to get NATO and Washington to give me a definition of what winning meant, and nobody could. You know, his successor was Sir David Richards, who later became the chief of defense staff or the British armed forces. He also said we didn't have a strategy. He says we had a lot of tactics, but we didn't have a coherent long-term strategy.

You have Army General Doug Lute, a three-star general who was the war czar for Bush and Obama in the White House, saying we didn't have the foggiest idea of what we were undertaking in Afghanistan. We didn't have a fundamental idea of what we were doing. I mean, these are pretty jaw-dropping comments from people who were in charge and completely different from the public statements and the talking points that were being fed to the public over the last 18 years. Okay, well, then why does the war churn on? Because it seems like, based on kind of what I know, what little I know in your reporting here, that everyone kind of knows this is bad and we shouldn't be doing it. Why does it continue? Why lie to the public? Well, I think that's why because, you know, they weren't being forthcoming to the public.

You know, the public talking points that military commanders and diplomats and presidents were making. They would all say some version of this. They would say, we're in a tough fight. There are challenges, but we're making progress. They would all say we're making progress. No matter how bad things got, they would always say we're making progress to justify why we're still there, why troops need to keep coming in, why we need to keep spending billions of dollars. That's the message being given to the public. The other message given to the public was that particularly over the last several years is that the war is effectively over.

President Obama declared an end to U.S. combat operations. He repeatedly promised to bring home all U.S. troops by the end of his presidency. Of course, those things didn't happen. But time and again in public, Obama and his generals and diplomats told the American people that the combat mission was over. You know, I was there when they said it. I was in Afghanistan with secretaries of defense when they would say this. And of course, it wasn't really true. I mean, there were fewer U.S. troops.

And yes, they were mostly there as advisors, but to say we haven't been involved in combat just sort of defies reality. So, you know, I don't think the American people are being told the truth. You can say that people who were involved in the war knew things were bad, and maybe the public had a good sense that things weren't going well. But there is a complete disconnect between the talking points and the public pronouncements of what the government was saying and what these key players in the war are saying in these interviews in the Afghanistan papers. I can't emphasize that enough. And that, to me, is the news. Okay. But how much of that do you think is that, to a certain extent, the American public is tuned out to these wars, especially Afghanistan?

I have no doubt the American public has been tuned out. I mean, I'm speaking broadly and generally here. I'm not saying everyone. But, you know, look, we've had correspondence in Afghanistan nonstop since, you know, 9-1 happened. I mean, we had correspondence there before, but, you know, we've gone 20 years as journalists with reporters on the ground in Afghanistan, reporting day by day, week by week, month by month, how things are going. And it's tough to get people to pay attention, particularly when the war drags on for this long and the issues never get resolved. So I'm sure people tune out.

But I also do think when the president or commanding generals say the combat mission is over, well, people tune out. There's not much, you know, they think the war is effectively over. When the current commanding general, General Scott Miller is in Afghanistan, he's been there for 18 months. He hasn't given a single press conference. He doesn't talk about the war publicly. So, you know, the Pentagon doesn't like to embed reporters there. So I think there's also an effort to minimize what's going on and to pretend that the conflict has ebbed, even though in some respects the war has gone on more strong. than ever. The air wars are more intense now than they have been at any time in the past 18 years. So I think there's actually an official effort to minimize what's going on. And I think that's part of the reason why the public is tuned out.

Well, do you think that it's then the responsibility of reporters like yourself to keep blaring this horn to make them care? And how do you do that? It's not my job to make people care. I mean, look, it's my job. job to report the news and same with my colleagues. And we try and do so in ways that are clear, that get the message through, that are factual. But, you know, it's up to people whether they care or not. I mean, I get it. People have tuned out. People are worn out by the war news. No question. But I also think it's kind of, how do I say, it's silly to blame the American public for not paying attention, like that's a reason to justify the failures of the war, to say that if only the American public have been paying attention, we wouldn't have made all these mistakes.

I think that's a way of deflecting responsibility and accountability from the people who were in charge and are in charge today. I agree with you that the headline is that the American public has been misled, and that's what the Washington Post's reporting really reveals here. But there is stuff that I, but some specifics that I think we need to get into because, as we've been talking about, a lot of the American public does not know exactly why and how this war has gone bad. So let's talk about, like I asked you a little bit before, tell me about opium. So I think that that's a really good window into discussing what's broken here.

Well, opium has been a problem ever since the war started. Afghanistan was historically a long-time producer. of opium, which of course, is used to make heroin and morphine. Ironically, the Taliban in 2000, Mullah Omar, who was the Taliban leader at the time, issued an edict in which he banned the farming of opium. And this is a way he was trying to curry favor with the West. But once 9-11 happened and the United States went to war in Afghanistan, the Taliban was toppled from power and, you know, Afghan farmers went.

back to planning poppies. And despite $9 billion spent by the United States, as well as very expensive efforts by its NATO allies like Britain, poppy production has soared. Since 2002, the number of acres of poppies has estimated to have soared by four times. And Afghanistan now produces between 80 and 90 percent of the world's supply of opium. So, you know, since, the war has been going on, the poppy problem, the opium problem has gotten far, far worse in spite of U.S. efforts to try and do something about it. And tell me about corruption in general in Afghanistan. Well, I know it's a big question.

Yeah. But that's one of the – It is a big question. But we've dumped almost a trillion dollars into Afghanistan in terms of reconstruction and war fighting. And that's not even including as your reporting notes. like veteran care, a lot of that has gone to reconstruction, and a lot of the reconstruction money is gobbled up through corruption.

What's going on? How does this work in Afghanistan? Well, think about it. We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars, not just on reconstruction, but on defense contracts, right? So all the fuel that's consumed by the U.S. military in Afghanistan, which is an enormous amount, that fuel us to get trucked in for the most part. So we're paying, you know, independent contractors for the fuel to transport the fuel.

And everybody's going to markup of that. When we pay for force protection, when we pay for food, we pay for water, we pay for communication. I mean, you know, everything gets sourced out. And Afghanistan is a tough place to get to. It's landlocked. It's around the other side of the world. So just all that money flowing into that country, both reconstruction aid and military operations, operations. There's a lot of people getting a share of it. And what the Afghanistan papers show

is that even though the U.S. government and particularly President Obama had promised to crack down on corruption in Afghanistan, who promised to hold people accountable, including at the senior levels of the Afghan government, people interviewed for the Afghanistan papers that hardly ever happened and that the U.S. government turned its eyes away from the problem because it came to a decision that it couldn't afford to alienate the Afghan government or rupture the partnership. It was dependent on the Afghan government, so it could only push so far on the corruption issue. And as a result, things just kept going the same way and getting worse. Now, tie this back to the Afghan National Army for me. As one of my favorites, the wrong words,

one of the stories that I've always thought was really indicative of kind of what's going on in that country is the way they pay the Afghan National Army and how much of that money is absorbed by intermediaries along the way and sometimes doesn't even make it to the soldiers. So do they have, does Afghanistan have its own fighting force? What does that even look like? Well, that's a really good question. On paper, the government of Afghanistan has about 350,000 soldiers and police. But for a long time, they couldn't quite account for them all, right? And so their salaries get paid indirectly by U.S. taxpayers. But when the United States kind of kept pressing the Afghan government to account for all these people,

it turned out that they could only actually account for maybe 250,000 of them. So that means there's 100,000 people who either weren't showing up or never existed. They became known as ghost soldiers or ghost police. That's been something that the U.S. government is trying to crack down on that problem, too, with mixed results. But, you know, if you've got an army on paper, it sounds like you've got 350,000 soldiers and police. That sounds like a formidable fighting force. But if, you know, almost a quarter of them don't exist or never show up,

I think that's indicative of a pretty big problem. The other, you know, there are so many other problems with the Afghan security forces. You know, the desertion rate is really high. The turnover rate is enormous. It's hard to recruit. And really, frankly, the biggest problem now is the casualty rate. The casualty rate from the Afghan army and police is so high that the Afghan government, a few years ago, decided to keep those figures classified because it was worried about demoralizing.

the population if the true figures got out. There's no question that Afghan security forces are taking the brunt of the fighting and are dying at rates that even U.S. commanders say is unsustainable. But the whole force in terms of training, its capabilities, you know, where the money goes, you know, it's a mess. All right. Let's swing back around to a bit of my mind. more of a meta conversation about your reporting, if we can.

You have, you file a lot of FOIAs. The Washington Post does a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests, I'm sure. Do you feel like the system is working as intended right now? No, not at all. So the Freedom Information Act was set up, I guess, in the late 60s, and it was a way for the public to have a basic understanding of what its government was up to. I mean, that's it in a nutshell. The public has a right to know what the government is doing in its name.

And the Freedom Information Act gives any member of the public, not just journalists, any member of the public, the right to ask for government records and reports. And technically under the law, the government agency has 20 days to respond. There are some exceptions to the law, the materials that don't have to be made public, like if they're classified or in some cases if they're personnel files. but there's no question this law is horribly flawed. Usually it takes months, if not years, for requests to be responded to. And government agencies and bureaucrats are pretty adept at finding ways to slow roll requests, particularly for information or records that might conceivably embarrassing in the political sense to the government. So this is a longstanding problem.

and unfortunately sometimes you have to take agencies to court, which is very expensive. I mean, fortunately, in this case, the Washington Post was willing to invest a lot of money hiring outside law firms to file two lawsuits against a special inspector general for Afghanistan. And we've been successful on both fronts, but it's been a very long, drawn out and costly process. And that's certainly not what Congress intended when it said, you know, there should be a Sunshine Act so that members of the public know what. the government is up to. Right. And this took three years of legal battles to get the reporting to the shape that it's in today, right?

Right, right. And think about it. Three years, right? I mean, that's a small part of the Afghan War. That's almost as long as U.S. involvement in World War II. Just to get interviews from senior leaders who were highly critical of how the war was being conducted, there's really no excuse to sit on these interviews for three years. Imagine if we'd had this material three years ago. Maybe we could have had a more public debate about the war a long time ago.

Maybe not at the beginning, maybe not at the middle, but certainly two or three years ago we could have had that debate. And maybe it would have been good for the public to be aware of these things then instead of now. Why was that legal battle important to your reporting? Why did you need the American public to see these statements and put names to them? I'll take the names issue first. We think it's important to hold government officials accountable. And, you know, people talk a lot about fake news and anonymous sources and all that stuff. So we try very hard to get officials on the record. And these are official government interviews. These are government reports. There's no question they were public information. And there's no reason we shouldn't know the names of people in the White House or at military headquarters in Kabul or at NATO.

headquarters who are critical about the war, not just critical, but essentially exposing how badly the war was run and how the public wasn't told the truth. That's sort of a no-brainer. The public has a right to know who is making those statements. Are these people who are senior leaders, or are they junior people that nobody's ever heard of? It makes a real difference, right? This is somebody who is in a position to make policy or give orders. Are those the people making these comments? Or they no-name low-rung people. You know, that's really important. So we're still pushing for that in court to get all the names of all these people gave these interviews.

I can't really think of a legitimate reason to withhold their names. The inspector general argues that these people are whistleblowers or informants or consultants. I mean, they've used all these arguments in court, even though, you know, they don't qualify in any of those counts. These people weren't whistleblowers in the Senate. that they called up the Inspector General with fraud or bribery to report. It was the opposite. The Inspector General reached out to them to interview them for information on what was going wrong with the war.

So these aren't whistleblowers. They're not criminal informants. These are diplomats, military officers, White House officials, USAID officials, people like that. And the public deserves to know who they are. They're almost like exit interviews in a way. I think so. I think that's right. Most of them were retired or former government officials.

A few were still currently employed in the government, but most of them were people who had served in the war in some fashion, usually for a couple years or a year or maybe more, all the way back to the beginning in 2001 up until 2018. There's also something perverse to me personally about collecting lessons learned for a future, ostensibly for a future war and not applying those lessons to the war that you're currently litigating. Is there any sense of self-reflection here? Is there any sense that we're going

to even attempt to fix what's happening? Well, that's a really interesting point. And the Inspector General would say, look, that's what they're trying to do. They did publish some public reports. I'd argue that they were really watered down. But there's no doubt they published public reports, putting out problems with corruption in the Afghan security forces, you know, to what degree Congress or the executive branch were paying attention or made any changes based on that? You know, I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence that it resolved in any change. You know, that's not the Inspector General's fault. You know, that gets back to Congress and people in the Defense Department, State Department, and other agencies. You know,

they're certainly aware of these problems, and they haven't been doing much about it, but you're right. I mean, the irony of doing a lessons learned campaign, and yet nobody's paying attention to it, that kind of borders on malpractice. Now, one thing I should note, though, the context, for when the Inspector General started this Lessons Learn campaign in 2014, everyone was under the assumption that the war was coming to an end. President Obama had declared an end to combat operations. He said he was going to pull all troops out within a couple of years. So there was a drawdown going on.

Everybody thought the war was coming to an end or was almost over, including the Inspector General. And I think that's why people were speaking so openly in these private interviews. But of course, that didn't happen. We're still there. And so in a way, it becomes simultaneously more important to learn these lessons. But at the same time, I think people were also more reluctant to actually change anything. because it would sort of constitute an admission of wrongdoing or failure of what they're doing now. So Senator Kristen Gillibrand of New York is calling for investigative hearings now.

What do you think the legislature could learn that hasn't already been stated, that hasn't been part of the reports that they've had access to? What could they learn, why call them now, what's new? You know, I honestly don't know. I mean, you know, Congress has sort of waxed in, waned in how it's paid attention to the war, both in terms of public hearings, as well as just its exercise of fiscal oversight. And, you know, there's nothing that's keeping these lawmakers from holding hearings now or trying to influence policy. You know, it's great to put out

press releases, but, you know, if they want to act, they can act. There's nothing holding them back. And certainly, I don't think they've been paying very close attention to what's going on Afghanistan because they're partly responsible or largely responsible too. And if they were to be critical of it, they'd be pointing at themselves. All right. Can I ask some cynical questions here at the end of our conversation? As long as I don't have to be cynical back. No, you are in control of your own responses, sir. Do you think that numbers are part of the problem here as far as the American public's one of my

ambivalence towards this you know there are almost 60,000 U.S. casualties in Vietnam, 40,000 soldiers killed in action. Almost 10 million people deployed over roughly 10 years. In Afghanistan, we haven't reached a million fighters. 2,300 dead.

We have actually more U.S. contractors have died than soldiers have. Do you feel like that lends to the lack of visibility in public indifference? Yes, certainly. I don't think that's cynical at all. I think there's no question. The difference between Afghanistan and the Vietnam were in that respect.

In Vietnam, we had a draft. We had a conscript army, you know, far more people dying in Vietnam than in Afghanistan. So that was a large part of what led to public protests and demonstrations. In Afghanistan, the casualties, particularly in Afghanistan, the casualties, particularly in the the last several years have dwindled. I mean, they're still real. There are still Americans in uniforms dying in Afghanistan, not at the numbers that they used to, but they're still there. They're still involved in the war. They're still being killed. But again, when you don't have pictures on TV of what's going on in the war, when you don't have commanding generals talking about it

on TV or in interviews, it's easy to not pay attention, particularly if you don't know anyone who's serving. At the same time, I was actually surprised in doing the reporting for this story. One of my colleagues, Dan Lamath, finally got some data out of the Pentagon on the number of people have deployed overall to the war. It took some doing to probably even that, those numbers loose, but he found that over 775,000 Americans have deployed at least once to Afghanistan since 2001. and that was a higher number than I expected. And the numbers of people have deployed two, three, four, five, or six times. You know, it's pretty startling the number of people.

I mean, how do you deploy six times to the same war, right? I mean, that's just on its face. We've kind of become immune to it. But, I mean, what other war in history do you deploy to six times? It's nuts. But that's how long this war has been going on. It feels like there's an inertia to it. this point. Like it's a beast all of its own that's moving forward and almost nobody has any

control over it. Here's my super cynical question, though, especially somebody who's read some of these cigar reports. It feels like there are people making money off of this in America, contractors. But do you think that that has any part of it or do you think it's way more complicated than that as to why this thing keeps going on? I think that's a fair question. I don't know. I'm not ready to say the reason the war goes on is because there's people profiting off it. I'm not quite ready to buy that. Are there people profiting off it? Absolutely. I'm not sure that's what's driving it. I think, frankly, the U.S. government just doesn't know how to get out of it. You know, members of Congress and whoever is president, the politicians are really afraid that if, they pull out of Afghanistan and just the idea that there might be another al-Qaeda attack on the United States that they would get blamed for it. It's also hard to pull out. And what if the Afghan government collapses and the Taliban takes power? Then you're essentially admitting

that the war failed on your watch, even if it was only partly on your watch. And I think that's why more than anything the war goes on is because politically it's really scary for these people to try and bring it to an end because there would be so much uncertainty. It's similar to that way in Vietnam when Lyndon Johnson kept sending more troops to Vietnam, even though he knew they were losing. It wasn't really a winnable war, but he was adamant that he wasn't going to go down as a U.S. president who lost a war. And I think that is still part of the issue.

The politicians don't want to be known as having been responsible for a losing war or one that doesn't end well. So in some ways, it's easier to just muddle on. No one wants to be the last one holding the bag. That's right. All right. I've got two more questions for you. First, you said that the legal battles are ongoing as far as your Freedom of Information Act requests. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're still trying to pry loose? Sure. So a few things. One are the names of more than 300

people who gave these interviews. We figured out about 100 names, but there's three, you know, the majority we still don't know. We know roughly their background or they were in the State Department or a senior military official or they were a British government official, but we're fighting for the names and that decision is in the hands of a federal judge. The other thing we're fighting for is there have been 200 more interviews done since we filed our last lawsuit. You Inspector General has refused to release any of those with the argument being, well, we'll see how this lawsuit winds if the Post wins John Sopko, the Inspector General, has said he'll release the rest. But so far he's been holding out. The other thing is there's an awful lot of redactions in the interview material that was released for all sorts of hard to decipher reasons. But we've asked the judge to remove those redactions, all the blacked out parts, so that people can see the full remarks that people made. All right.

And the last question is one I always ask when we have someone on to talk about Afghanistan. How does this end, do you think? What does the ending of this actually look like? And is it in sight? So I think there's a broad consensus, even among military commanders today, certainly out of the Pentagon, that the only way to end the war is with a political settlement of some kind. that it's not going to be won on the battlefield, at least the United States isn't going to vanquish the Taliban.

Their numbers have risen since 2009 when Obama took office. We're kind of at a stalemate now, but the United States is not going to have a military victory where it vanquishes the Taliban for a lot of reasons. So political settlement's the only way out. That's going to be tough. President Trump is the first U.S. president of the three who's agreed to hold direct face-to-face negotiations with the Taliban.

Bush and Obama didn't want to do that. They only would consider that as long as any talks were held through the Afghan government. But Trump has agreed to do it directly between Washington and the Taliban. There seems to be some optimism. At least these talks have been going on even while the war is raging. But what kind of deal they reach, how that could play out, how the Taliban would then negotiate any sort of settlement with the Afghan government. You know, there's so many things up in the air and it's hard to envision how that's all going to play out.

But, you know, at least a diplomatic solution, I think, is the only solution. And at least we're trying on that front. Craig Whitlock with the Washington Post. Thank you so much for coming onto War College and walking us through all of this. Happy to do it. Thanks for having me. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in War College listeners.

War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin Nodell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. This is the last thing I got to do before I go and take some time off for Christmas. So, you know, guys know the show. If you like the show, like, subscribe, post a review on iTunes. We're on Twitter at War underscore College. I'm at MJ Galt. Kevin's at KJK. Nodell.

We will be back. Week after next. Next week will be a rerun. New content in two weeks time as we all take a little time off for Christmas. Stay safe until then.